YouTube More Likely to Direct Election-Fraud Videos to Users Already Skeptical

What would such an "escape hatch" look like?

I sometimes get YouTube recommendations where I think, "why would I ever watch that?" and I either ignore them or mark them as "not interested". Most people probably do the same.

What's the alternative? Every corrupt leader since Nero has called their opposition's true statements "conspiracy theories" or similar and suppressed their statements as such; or deliberately invented conspiracy theories about their opponents and declared the truth to be the conspiracy. You can look up speeches in which Fascist and Nazi leaders denounced the "conspiracy theories" against them, which were (at the time) actually "unfounded" despite turning out almost completely true. We didn't know about the true horrors of the Nazi death camps until after the war ended, despite the "conspiracy theories" running rampant and often violently suppressed.

The alternative is to, quite literally, allow someone to be an arbiter of the truth, and then suppress information they determine is not factual. To which I say, give me this power, and in 30 years, I will be an emperor.

Discussion of election fraud implies the dishonesty of government officials, which is strictly forbidden by the Anti-Bullying Act of 2031.

Do they really want that, though, or do they simply get more excited by it? Let's take a more striking example: someone trying to avoid wallowing in a pit of despair and grief over a loved one dying. I feel like many such people would tell you they are actively wanting to and even trying to avoid triggers for such, but once they run into one it pulls at them and they start to fall down a rabbit hole where a few hours later they are staring at old photos, listening to depressing music, and sobbing their eyes out.

Now, imagine you have the job to recommend content for them. I feel like not only would a compassionate person know to avoid these triggers "for the user's own good" (which I would find way too paternalistic), even a really competent human (or a truly powerful AI) that was optimizing for "what this user wants" would avoid triggering content as the customer probably is even able to express this want verbally.

The issue, though, is that if you happen to ascertain (whether by active analysis or more passive experimentation) "omg every time I show them this thing they immediately drop everything else they are doing and spend three hours watching similar videos!!! this is amazing: I have found the best possible thing to show them!!!" and act on that despite it not being what the user wants you are just being evil.

And that's Google: the people at Google that work on this software are evil. Google employees seem to just be selfishly optimizing for "engagement" (to the extent to which they succeed... honestly they aren't even all that great at it, but they do much better than we would actually want ;P) and will just blindly show people stuff that they themselves might actively wish to avoid but can't help but get sucked into... so Google can make more ad money.

In the case of these conspiracy theories, I will contend most people want to be informed. They are momentarily skeptical of something, which makes them likely to get turned on easily by these videos, but then it is Google that radicalizes them by realizing "omg when I show them more videos of this form they just keep digging into the rabbit hole!!! SO MUCH AD MONEY" and "ugh when I show them videos from the other side they get turned off and maybe even drop the whole issue and go off to do something else more productive... that sucks! :/".

The engineers at Google have thereby built a system that, sure, "shows you what you want", but it shows you the most twisted, myopic, and even cruel version of what you want in the name of making them ad revenue over all other potential benefits to the user. Sure, sometimes this can be rationalized as showing the user something they legitimately found fun or interesting, and if you go into it with a careful mind and a wall of defenses it is possible to get what you need despite this perverted optimizer... but, I would hope we all can understand that it goes much deeper than that and that the negative effects are not ones that should be ignored in the name of making more money.

No, I don't believe 'we all' know such a thing, so could you please cite some data?

Offhand, my recollection of just about all the major press coverage (pick an article on it from any of them) is along these lines:

In 2016, Trump won the majority of Electoral College votes

In 2016, Hillary won the national popular vote

The interstate voting compact does not yet have enough electors to follow the popular vote.

My recollection of the timeline is: In early 2016 the DNC might have rigged their internal voting in support of Hillary, rather than Bernie. The press didn't do a good enough job covering that with transparency so I'm not sure. I know this almost alienated me (as a generally left leaning voter) from voting D. I know at least one friend who wanted change of any sort enough to vote for Trump after that. It was a close race, to alienating their base like that _may_ have rigged things in favor of the candidate that won the electoral vote.